by Gustaf Westerlund | May 22, 2007
Some of you who read this blog are probably consultants and find it strange (or stupid) that I should share my knowledge with you and others on this blog and in the forums that I attend (mostly the swedish forum www.itproffs.se). Some other find it strange that I wont give answers to certain questions, so I thought I might clear things up a bit by describing my thoughts on what to blog on and what not.
In general, I will blog on topics that are non-customer specific, meaning that I will discuss common problems, design patterns, installation issues, tips and tricks. I might also discuss a specific solution in the aspect that it might be of interest for other implementors as inspiration. However, specific customer problems that are very unlikely to happen in other environments, customer specific analysis and designs are what I do for a living. I will not blog on these topics, in more than a general sense.
So, I will be more than happy to share my thoughts on common issues and if you want my opinion on any of those, please comment my blog or send me an email at gustaf (a) humandata.se.
I apply the same rules for postings in forums meaning that I will not answer questions like:
“We are a company that has 50 emplyees with 10 inside sales and 4 outside sales. How should we configure CRM?”. This question can only be answered by doing a deeper analysis of how the companys sales processes (and other processes) work, and the answer is a CRM design. The same question but focused on which license or what hardware would be needed, is more of a general question and this I could discuss.
Of course there will always be gray areas and I will leave this to my judgement and I hope you will respect this.
As for commenting, your chances are a lot greater if your comments are not anonymous. I also like to quote my grandfather who used to say: “It is better to drive a strong point than strong language (freely translated from Swedish)” meaning that harsh language will get you nowhere.
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | May 21, 2007
Today I held another crash-course in Extending MS CRM 3 with .NET. It is a very comressed version of the MOC (Microsoft Official Curriculum) course with the same name. The attendées were 4 very sharp CRM professionals from Cybernetics and Releye. If you are interested in attending this course please contact Informator at www.informator.se.
We were discussing the problems with kerberos double-hopp trust delegation when using a SQL RS on a different server than the CRM server. It dawned on my however that a similar problem might acctually arise if you choose to host your custom aspx-files on a separate server from the CRM-server. I am no expert at this kerberos stuff but would find it quite possible that you might get this problem. I havn’t tested this, so treat it as a hunch. If anyone has confirmation or the opposite, please comment this posting.
In short, to avoid potential problems, make sure your website for you custom websites are hosted on the same server as CRM. (please note that it is not supported to use the same website as CRM).
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | May 14, 2007
Today I held a presentation at this years SharePoint and Exchange Forum in Nynäshamn, close to Stockholm, here in Sweden. Lots of very interesting experts here like Patrick Tisseghem, Michael Noel and Nick Swan, not forgetting my boss, Göran Husman and other great speakers from Microsoft and other companies.
The presentation I held was BDM-focused and concerned the power of simple mesh-up integration between SharePoint and MS CRM 3. The main point being that SharePoint has a lot of great features that can be used by other applications.
One of the most powerful ones is excel services that can very powerfully be used as a reports tool for MS CRM. The main advantages being the ease of use for the end users and report owners since they easily can modify their own reports with Excel.
It is almost too simple to write a blog about it, since it is very straight forward, but I will see if I can get something together anyway.
By the way, I am expecting to be a father around the 1:st of june (my first child!) and I migth be a bit absent for a week or two after this event, but I will be back.
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | May 14, 2007
The CRM Team blog has announced that MS now have released the next version of CRM List WebPart.
I have tried it on a system with English CRM and SharePoint and it works great!
However, I tried the previous version on a Swedish version of CRM and SharePoint and that did not work as well, especially the installation. I was able to install it manually after quite a lot of work. If this version has the same problems I cannot say.
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Apr 26, 2007
As most of you probably know, SharePoint should be installed with two service accounts. One, lets call it spserviceaccount, should be the account that runs all SharePoint web applications, all mysites etc and the otherone, lets call it spappserviceaccount, should only run the central admin app-pool.
So why, well, imagine if you hade the same account even for central admin, what could happen? If, someone bad, was to hack the SharePoint so that it could start running bad programs, they would also be able to create new sites, delete sitecollections and more. Not very nice, hence we use a special app account central admin to make sure that we are just a bit safer.
How do we do set it?
Best way is to actually run the installation wizard as spappserviceaccount and make sure you set the right user in every step of the installation.
Already up and running and want to change it?
Well, I havn’t tried this, but it is supposed to be doable using stsadm, please check this kb-article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838
It should be something like:
stsadm –o updatefarmcredentials –userlogin DomainNameUserName -password NewPassword
But please check the article.
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
Recent Comments